The company wants a replacement for traditional rubber and thinks it's found one.

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Let's talk about tires. As the only part of our cars that actually touch the road, they're obviously incredibly important, but few people consider them much more than boring round black things. That's not entirely surprising. While most car companies will wax rhapsodic over their latest and greatest bits of technology, their colleagues on the tire-side of things tend to be much more inscrutable. Here's a fact that surprised me recently: did you know that even now in the 21st century, between 10 and 30 percent of the rubber in the tires you can buy still comes from trees? Although tires also contain synthetic rubber in them, the complex long polymers formed by Mother Nature provide much better wear characteristics.

The fact that all of our vehicles are dependent upon latex tapped from trees is not ideal. The rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis to its friends) only really grows in certain locales near the equator, and that means supplies are under threat from climate change and are also sometimes hostage to unstable governments. For the past few years, Continental has been looking for alternatives, and the company believes it has found one in an unlikely source: the Russian dandelion.

Enlarge/ This is a Russian dandelion root, which produces a natural latex that Continental wants to use in place of the rubber tree.

Continental Tires

"We've been looking into the idea for at least the last five years," explained Dr Peter Zmolek, one of Continental's engineers working on the project. "Fairly recently we started going into it with a more serious approach—building tires—and more recently we've committed to investment in a facility that would allow us to start making it on a more productive scale." Continental wanted to find a material that was close enough to natural rubber trees that it would allow them to just drop the material into their tire production process, which meant finding a plant that made the right kind of latex.

The Russian dandelion turned out to be the closest match: "There are other strains of dandelion, but the Russian dandelion is a very large plant, and the rubber is in the roots, which is what we're harvesting. It produces a significant amount of latex which is close enough to the rubber tree that it works for us." And unlike the rubber tree, Russian dandelions can grow in a much wider range of locations, including temperate climates like North America and Europe (and on land that is unsuitable for food production). On top of that, you only need a year between planting them and harvesting rubber from their roots, compared to about seven years for a freshly planted rubber tree.

The company subbed in dandelion latex for the regular stuff in a batch of its winter tires (WinterContact TS 850 Ps) and after many miles of testing in Sweden and Germany, the company has decided dandelions are an acceptable replacement. "Winter tires typically have a higher amount of natural rubber, and the test was not to change the recipe at all, just a one-to-one swap from the rubber tree to the dandelion rubber," Zmolek told us. "They performed exactly as expected, which showed we were able to do this swap."

Right now, Continental is working with the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology, the Julius Kuehn-Institute, and the plant breeder Aeskulap to breed strains of the plant with optimized rubber yields. "The challenge is not in the technology itself, but the agronomy, so we can rely on it as a continuous source," Zmolek told us. Assuming that goes to plan, we should start to see dandelion tires on sale in the next five to ten years.